


Serpent of Heaven

by StellarRequiem



Category: Good Omens (TV), Good Omens - Neil Gaiman & Terry Pratchett
Genre: Crowley was an angel once, M/M, Seraphim, True Forms, kissing but like also on a spiritual level
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-20
Updated: 2019-06-20
Packaged: 2020-05-15 10:08:00
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 968
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19293550
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/StellarRequiem/pseuds/StellarRequiem
Summary: “We all start somewhere,” he hisses. “Some of us had staffs and swords. Some of us had wings. Doesn't matter now.”Crowley was a seraph once--Aziraphale loves him in every form.





	Serpent of Heaven

**Author's Note:**

> I don't know as much angelology as I'd like, but I have done my best. If anyone has any good resources on that, though, please feel free to drop them in the comments!

“. . . Crowley,” Aziraphale begins softly, pausing the absent back and forth rubbing of his palm along the other's back, “may I ask you something personal?”

Crowley looks up from his phone, the glance defensively sideways.

“You can ask.”

“How many wings do you have, really? Sometimes I catch a glimpse of you and it's like there are more than, well, the two. That you show.”

Crowley looks determinedly back to his phone.

“Does it matter?”

“No!” Aziraphale scrambles, “not at all. I just wondered if it's really my eyes playing tricks on me.”

Crowley turns the phone over in his hands.

“Have you ever looked up the etymology of _seraphim,_ angel? In all your reading?” he speaks while hunching further and further forward, forearms on his thighs, as though he might dive from the sofa.

“I have. It comes from the word for serpent, as it were.” A strange, little discussed truth.

Crowley gives him a look that's surprisingly harsh, considering it's a sideways one.

“We all start somewhere,” he hisses--rather literally. “Some of us had staffs and swords. Some of us had wings. Doesn't matter now.”

Aziraphale glances down at his book without seeing it.

“Right, right. I suppose not. Besides,” he looks up again, offering up his softest little smile, “as far as heaven and hell are concerned, we're both a bit of neither now, aren't we?”

“Something like that, yeah.” Crowley looks absently--forcedly—about the room, clears his throat, and leans back into the sofa. It does not go unnoticed that this prevents Aziraphale from returning his hand to his shoulders.

He could leave it right there, he knows, let it be, but it feels wrong, somehow. He slides across the couch to cup Crowley's face in his palm.

“Look at me, darling.”

Crowley looks at him from beneath his lashes as though he could hide behind them.

“I've never cared what you look like, or where you've been. I love who you _are._ You could look like one of those thousand-eyed burning wheel types under it all and I wouldn't mind.”

“I remember those guys! _Weird_ bunch, them.” Crowley brightens for a moment with the commentary. It doesn't last terribly long, though—he looks askance again. He's silent for quite a while.

“You report to archangels. Well, did,” he mutters finally, tone distant. “If I'd managed to stay in heaven we may never have met.”

“Don't say that,” Aziraphale strokes his cheek, “you'll make me thankful you fell, and that's just in poor taste.”

Crowley chuckles, just a little.

“Can't have that, can we?”

Aziraphale smiles, and presses a kiss into his temple. He's retracting when Crowley seizes his hands.

“Aziraphale.”

“Yes?” he doesn’t mean to sound so flustered.

“Do you want that? All of me, as I am?”

Aziraphale softens, and squeezes Crowley's long fingers. He knows what he's asking—to see a being such as he's described in a fallen state, it's a terrible thing. A wrenching fate the likes of which should repulse and horrify an angel—a warning against, well, falling. But he's already fallen where Crowley is concerned. Quite some time ago.

“Be not afraid, they always say,” he murmurs. “Well, I'm not.”

Steel-eyed, Crowley does something the two of them don't normally do: he leans in and kisses him. Deeply, on the mouth. He has a sharp taste.

As Crowley wraps his arms around Aziraphale he can feel dimensions falling away, time dropping free of the two of them until he can feel sand beneath his bare feet and oh, like this he can't be anything but himself, either, and he lets his wings unfold to either side of the palm Crowley has pressed into his shoulders. They blur together, as much energy as they are anything, and for a moment it's radiant and he imagines he can taste that first apple, as Eve did, on Crowley's forked tongue. It flicks against his lips as he pulls away, and it's all Aziraphale can do not to follow him.

He finds himself, when he opens his eyes, in the sands outside of time with his hands holding tight to Crowley's upper arms, scales smooth beneath his palms. Crowley is mostly covered in them in his natural form, his usually prominent nose turned serpentine, pupils narrow black gashes in his startling yellow eyes. And indeed, there they are: a great black shadow framing him so that the wings of Death seem meek in comparison, not two but six dark-feathered wings sprouting from his back. Aziraphale slides his arms around him to feel the places where they root into his shoulders. His own hands look like bright, vague shapes of light, and he's aware of the weight of a circlet of gold embedded in his flesh, a crown about his head, a shape he hasn't worn since the first days of heaven when there was yet to be an Earth. This is what they are—an angel, and the fallen, a terrible being in the oldest sense of the word, awesome and fearsome and dark. An angel's negative, and nightmare.

Though Aziraphale is presently more light than flesh, he manages to lean in, eyes open, and mutter into Crowley's lips: “You are beautiful.”

And in this place outside of time, they kiss again, so earnestly it defies these representative physical forms and they blur into energy once more, yellow-gold and black and white, closed in a tight dark space within encircling wings so they stand, densely packed together, like  the stardust-to-be at the beginning of the universe before God exploded it into being.

When they melt back into time, into their usual bodies, they are still pressed together at the mouth, clutching each other with arms tight around shoulders, palms spread in reverence over the places where wings can be.


End file.
